


fates fulfilled

by CorvidFeathers



Category: Arthurian Mythology, Arthurian Mythology & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, Morgan le Fay as both ambitious mortal sorceress and fae healer, Post-Battle of Camlann
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-12 16:17:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19135630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorvidFeathers/pseuds/CorvidFeathers
Summary: Morgan le Fay has known since she was a child she would be the one to find her brother on the field of Camlann.--“Is this how it ends?”“Yes,” she says, with the voice of a Fae-touched who can no longer truly lie.  “And no.”





	fates fulfilled

**Author's Note:**

> hello im here 700 years late to this party and im ready to spin nonsense out of wholecloth
> 
> This story takes hints from a bunch of the old Arthurian sources but doesn't follow any of them strictly/has a fair amount with no basis in canon that I just wanted to explore. Like, some of the significant knights dying at Camlann instead of earlier, and Mordred being Morgause's son, but Morgan le Fay's ward, and Morgan le Fay being partially raised with Arthur and Kay.

The air of Camlann is thick with magic.

It hangs in the air, potent enough to make the woman stop in her tracks, heavy enough to almost take shape and brush against her skin.  She breathes it in, until it overwhelms the smell of iron and death, until it blots away the battlefield entirely, and there is nothing but her and it.  The magic of fate, unwinding from a prophecy fulfilled, like threads unraveling from a torn tapestry.

The sense of standing at the edge of a precipice sweeps over the woman, along with a sense of giddiness she has not felt in many a year.  For a moment, she is one and twenty again, ambitious and bold and and ready to make the world bend to her whims. This is the sort of moment she would have bled and suffered for, then; this is the sort of the moment she longed for with a desire overwhelmed all else.  She did everything then, for just a breath of slack in the line of fate, ready for her hand.

Now it has come, and she is both old, and not, and ready, and not, and the only witness, and not.

She could spin herself a crown, a kingdom, a fate.  She could rend the world apart, for all it had done to her.

The blood pooling at her feet cools the embers of her most violent impulses.  She steps further through the battlefield, not looking too long at any one face, but noting them all the same.  Here is Sir Dinadan, who gave her not a moment of peace whenever she managed to capture him, clever tongue at last silenced.  And there the earnest Sir Percival, who had once been brave and foolish enough to seek her aid, his eyes wide and gray as the mourning sky, and just as empty.  Sir Erec, severed from his Enide forever. Sir Galehaut, crowned in nothing more than blood. And so many more.

Old enemies, more oft than they were friends.  But this place is no longer her home, and old ambitions and grievances are ash both on her tongue.  She has had enough of breaking.

As she climbs closer to the center of the battlefield, she reaches out and weaves the torn threads carefully around her hands, with the practiced eye of a seamstress.

She finds them at the center of the storm, as she always has.

Mordred’s life has already been torn from him.  He died as stubborn as he lived, with his fingers clenched around his broken blade, his body so cut and battered his armor was more red than silver.  At some point in the fight, he had cast his helm and shield aside; both lay broken in the mud, and his wan face was turned up to the sky, eyes closed, the remains of a snarl twisting his lips.

She wants to fall to her knees.  She wants to draw him close, this foster-child she knew and loved so well, the blood of her brother, the last of her brother’s family, the dearest to her, the fae-child on whom she once thought to pass on her gifts.

 _Oh, child,_ she thinks, bleak as dawn.   _If only you had never set your heart on being a knight._

Sir Percival’s mother had said the same, she knew.  She had prayed it, every night as she tucked her son into bed, deep in the woods, far from the world that had stolen everything from her.  Had that good lady been fae-touched, she might have fancied spiriting her son away from the cruelties of the word, to Avalon, where they could have spent long hours learning the magics of the world instead of the arts of steel and blood.  There were no woods deep enough to keep her son from learning of war, of cruelty, but in the fae-lands he might have lived forever.

That was what Morgan le Fey had fancied once, when her own ward had grown older, and wiser in the ways of the world, and the prophecy that fate had looped around his neck.  He had been given to her in hopes she could unwind it.

But in the end, she gave Mordred a choice, the choice of living a life in halves, fae-touched, magic-woven, apart and a part of the world, or the gleaming, gloried, short life of a knight, abreast in the matters of the world.  

So her Mordred and someone else’s Percival lay dead, along with uncounted others.

But none of the fate woven around her fingers can undo that, and Morgan le Fey has never been one to stop and weep.

She leaves Mordred untouched, unmourned, for the moment, and kneels by the second figure.

It is like taking a step into a dream, or a song, or history itself; she must have lived this moment a thousand times over already, and yet there is a horrible newness to it.  

( _She must have known of this moment since the days she had played in the long-forgotten woods.  It had caught her even as she chased Kay and Arthur, tainting the summer-haze of her childhood.  Her playmates, blissfully unaware, had ran ahead, their shouts of joy ignorant of the sorrow that crashed down upon Morgan, sorrow too great and too old for her seven years to understand._

_“What’s the matter, wood-sprite?” Arthur asked, eyes dark and gentle._

_“She’s just crying ‘cause she couldn’t keep up with us,” Kay scoffed, with all the confidence and disdain of being the oldest. But when the words drew another splitting wail from Morgan, he too had dropped to his knees beside her._

_Even with the devotion of both her brothers, Morgan le Fey had wept until she ran out of tears._

_Kay, sharp of tongue, was sometimes right._ )

She knew Arthur would live until she arrived.  That was all the kindness her Sight had given her.

His armor is as wrent and bloody as Mordred’s, his wounds as grave, the glistening of flesh and bone evident beneath the deep, cruel sword-cuts.  But still his chest rises and falls, as she knew it would.

His face bears the weight of the past year heavily.   The Arthur who came to treat with her in her sanctum, when this whole business had begun, had seemed almost untouched by age and experience, ever the youthful summer-king.  Civil war stripped those glories from him; his face is gaunt, and shadowed, patterned with new scars; new streaks of gray cut through the gold of his youth.

Morgan le Fey reaches out, and touches his face, as gently as she can bare, for she knows she must wake him.

Arthur’s eyes flicker open, clouded storm’s-blue.  Recognition breaks over his face- recognition, and wonder.  Even now, so close to death, he knows her.

“Wood-sprite,” he murmurs, for the first time in decades, and the last of the barriers born of their twin ambitions melts away.  “I was a fool.’ His smile is a terrible thing, bloodstained and weary, but it sparks old instincts of rivalry, of love, all the same.

“You were.”  She smiles back.

“Is this how it ends?”

“Yes,” she says, with the voice of a Fae-touched who can no longer truly lie.  “And no.” She brushes a lock of hair from his face with one hand, twining the threads of fate in the other.  

Something like a laugh escapes him, rough and pained.  “Never a straight answer.”

“Never.”  A little smile turns up the corners of her lips.  

“Why… why… you… how?”

“It was always going to be me, here,” she says.  “I’ve known for a long time.”

“How long?”  The words are coming harder now, flecked with blood.  Their time is slipping away, but she doesn’t want these moments to end.

She thinks of the woods—

 

( _“Wood-sprite!” Kay called, pulling himself up to the top of the rock.  Arthur followed, a moment later, despite his shorter limbs. A feat, but one that cannot watch Morgan, who has managed to spirit herself up into the leaves of the great spreading-oak._

 

_The boys- her brothers, though they cannot truly share blood with the wild fae-child who they pulled from the woods one day- shouted after her, warning and goading in equal part._

 

_She climbed higher and higher, until Kay and Arthur are specks on the ground, their words drowned by the rustling speech of the true and the whistle of the wind.  It is Arthur’s words she heard last, caught on a friendly breeze._

 

_“You’ll break your neck!”_

 

 _“I won’t!” she called back.  She knew how the both of them would die, and she knows she will live to see it._ )

 

— and how what was can never be again.  The certainty of then, the terrible certainty that she has carried for years upon years, that she will live at least until this moment of sorrow, her own terrible fate, is loosening at last.  All she wants is to cling to it.

“Since I was a girl,” she says, and knows what she must do.

Arthur’s eyes fill with sorrow, and he reaches up to grip her arm.  “Morgan-”

She clasps his hand.  “Be still.”

She cannot take Mordred to Avalon, and teach him the ways of the fae.  But she can take her brother, Camelot’s king.

Altering fate, in a moment like this, is easier than she had imagined it.  She lets the threads slip a little from their coil around her fingers, and then plucks them from the air with her other hand, weaving and shaping them to her purpose.  Weaving them around Arthur, around the terrible wounds, around his searching blue eyes.

The spell is complete with a little word, and a pull of her hand.  A stitch in fate, and the world moves for Morgan le Fey, the terrible stillness of the battlefield gleaming with the glow of her magic for moment.

She bends forward, more bone-weary than she has been since she left for Avalon, her hands clasping Arthur’s once more.  

This is a breath of respite, nothing more.  Time enough for her to spirit him away. Time to heal, to sleep.  Stolen just for her brother.

She had always been good at stealing things.

Her brother is, surprisingly, still awake, though his eyes look heavy and unfocused.  “Wood-sprite…” he murmurs. “Guinevere… Lancelot…”

She puts a hand on his cheek again.  “I will not be the bearer of your regrets.”  The words are gentle, but cold. One as fae-touched like her cannot help but tell the truth.  “Perhaps you will tell them yourself, one day. But for now, this world has no place for us.”

His lips turn up, a little.  “In the woods…” he says. “You… and me… and Kay.  Slipping away to… those ruins… our own castle.”

The words make her chest ache.  For the child Arthur had been, inquisitive and kind and caring.  For their older brother, who will once again be left behind, who will suffer and grieve and die the mortal’s death she knows is his, once again abandoned by his fated siblings.  If there were time, she would fly to him, and tell him that once- just this once, even if it is merely pity- she forgives him for choosing Arthur instead of her.

“Yes, just like that.  I’ve found us another fortress.  For now it is mine, but perhaps it can become our very own,” she says, leaning down to press a kiss to his forehead.  “Sleep, now.”

For once, her brother does what she asks of him.

**Author's Note:**

> where's kay? i really have no idea. if he had died here at camlann it rlly would have rounded out a trio of griefs for morgan le fay but i thought the narrative needed morgan to move fairly quickly over the deaths of Arthur's knights, and kay would complicate things. also, he often doesn't seem to die in the various canons, so


End file.
